This is the third story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. Read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction from previous years, here.
After they bomb the sanctuary, the boy hunts through the debris, wraps his head in intricate lace veils—some rosetted, some scalloped, some pearled—draws up his hood, and pulls on his work gloves to collect shards of stained glass for his mosaic. He separates the pieces with images of children from those with bearded men, layering them between folds of freshly laundered altar cloth. At home, he has egg cartons full of shards with fingers that he will match into hands and egg cartons with letters he can make into words.
The boy has plenty to do each day of the war: jumping jacks, sit-ups, pushups, gorilla swings, and tree pose during breaks from reading and doing the math in workbooks scavenged from the rubble of his school. He’s never had so many art supplies: pastels in every color, rubber cement, gummy erasers.
His toy cars are out of gas, creating chaos at the checkpoint, but the plastic horses can still get through. Dead or alive, horses are useful in war. He sketches a hungry girl in a unicorn hat, dragging a horse’s hind leg behind her, heading home to the fire.
A grenade takes out the windows of a house, but the root cellar is left immaculate. The boy climbs down the ladder dreaming of pie. Rhubarb, apple butter, peaches, plums, peppers, pickles, varieties of vinegar—all arranged by color inside the jars—appear before him after his eyes adjust, whole seasons suspended like insects in amber, the entire last year of his childhood preserved in glass. He will eat one here where it’s safe, with the silver spoon tucked inside his vest pocket. He will bike the others back in his pack.
War brings a harvest of tires for an obstacle course and an abundance of bricks for garden beds. Each day, he brings in flowers for the table, arranging a bouquet in the shrapnel pattern of a close-range bomb, then adding balance and texture while avoiding color combinations that evoke the enemy flag. Today: hyacinths for the table, daisies for the graves, rose petals to dry for tea, violets to jelly.
The boy is reading a book about the gods. In his journal, he keeps a list of their likes and dislikes, their favorite sacrifices: wine, milk, honey, cake, animals, children. He lines up his stuffed animals from most favorite to least. This process takes time and includes a stage of interrogation (“Do you prefer to watch the sunrise or the sunset? How would your enemy describe you? If you could be any mythological creature, what would you be?”), and, if that fails, a few rounds of “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.” The bottom bunk, like the basement, is a safer space. Dawn is the time to pray to the gods above, and twilight to the gods below, but, without windows, it’s hard for the boy to keep track of the time.
His mother must retrace her steps each day for water.
On his birthday, the boy squeals when she hands him a metal detector she found abandoned in a nearby field. All that invisible treasure! He knows that a metal detector cannot detect gemstones, paper, pearls, bone, glass, or the plastic mines that are sometimes called butterflies and sometimes parrots. The boy debates the merit of each name: on the one hand, chrysalides are green and hard and prone to explode in riots of incandescence; on the other, parrots are green, loud, and obnoxious.
In his robot suit crafted from silver and gold safety blankets, the boy is invincible and warm. A soldier could easily mistake him for a piece of trash, an exploded casing, or a body covered in a blanket, not moving. He’s fashioning a pink-and-green mylar dress for his mother. She is a rose—a subtle camouflage for spring—but who would believe that a rose could grow in this hard zone?
One of the things lost during a war is names. There are hundreds of names for roses, but nothing, the boy contends, can beat damask. He used to like the idea of masking as an act—masking paper to keep watercolors apart—but then he saw men on the ground blindfolded with duct tape. Still, damask sounds soft, and even with your eyes closed you can breathe in its sweet wooden scent.
Red means love, but a pink rose means thank you or believe me.
Robots have numbers. Men have call signs. Beast. Smoke.
The boy is stealing eggs and a length of bright string from a nest—why not? Math matters now more than before: how far this or that enemy is from his mother’s heart, her neck. He measures the string around his neck, hoping to hang on it the diamond he wishes to give her someday.
If the amount of darkness is exactly equal to the amount of daylight, there’s some sort of balance left—in nature, anyway. A noose on the neck of a rabbit twitches. One must eat. “A fine meal for the goddess of spring,” the boy says aloud.
Wars are boring: footsteps of territory lost over a period of years. The excavation of millimetres of earth over a period of centuries is more exciting. You might find the shard of a bone flute or a crude toy.
Some of the shells are signed, like a poem, before firing. The boy thinks he’d rather remain anonymous. I don’t want anyone to say my name.
The boy cuts out the uniforms from a book of paper-doll soldiers and glues them to a crayoned landscape of skinny trees, silhouettes of horses, and the occasional acrylic farm animal: a smiling pig, grinning dogs. He draws faces for the soldiers: a monocle here, a mustache there, an eye patch, rosy cheeks. It doesn’t matter if the left-handed scissors slip in his right hand. It’s more realistic: an arm gone here, a foot there.
If caught outside during an air strike, the boy knows to tuck his body into the smallest possible footprint and open his mouth, a position his mother calls “yawning baby.” The shock wave from the bomb squeezes your guts and, if you hold your breath, will pop you like a balloon: bang! The boy says, “Bang! Bang! Bang!”
“But what if I have the hiccups?” the boy asks, and, receiving no answer, goes back to knitting his three-hole balaclava with a decorative pompom. “The Devil’s darning needle,” he says, then bops his head in time to the rhyme In through the front door / Go around the back, / Out through the window / And off jumps Jack. “Why call them stick bugs when you could call them phasmids or Phasmatodea or ghost or leaf or both or THE WORLD’S LARGEST INSECT?”—which is what the boy, returning home yesterday afternoon, wrote in bright markers on an unfurled strip of butcher paper. He had gone out to gather sticks to weave into a D.I.Y. funeral wreath when he saw a twig move.
Cave paintings were made by children while their parents fought the war, the boy thinks, as he decorates the basement walls in neon chalk. He begins with rectangular beds of simple flowers and the circular shaved heads of the prisoners kneeling, stick figures holding their helmets in their hands. The bodies on the building’s balconies are wrapped in embroidered wedding cloth. Where to put the sun? Near the daisies, but in the picture it is winter.
The boy decides that each village he and his mother visit is like a flower on a butterfly’s migration. “We have to keep going,” the boy’s mother says, “until we are safe.”
“Men are killed protecting butterflies,” the boy says, as he and his mother walk through a forest split by a fighter jet. The leaves under their feet are black. The boy sets a goal of identifying forty-five different birds in one day, but the birds don’t like the noise of war, so there is no birdsong. The boy switches to identifying animal tracks: deer prints look similar to those of the feral hog, but the shape of a deer hoof in the mud is closer to a teardrop. Also, pigs are social animals and, therefore, more threatening; there are so many of them. The boy scans the perimeter, performing his daily eye exercises.
He walks upstream and downstream again, looking for a place with many channels where the river will be easier to cross. Dispersion means slower flow and shallower water, the presence of sandbars interrupting the stream. His mother can’t swim.
He throws in a stick and matches its speed. He listens to the resonance of a rock sinking into the water; it seems quiet. He tests again. He unbuckles the belts of his pack and steps in with one foot and his walking stick. He holds out his hand and tells his mother not to look down at the twisting water.
The boy can taste his loose tooth in his mouth. It’s hanging on by a thread. Overnight, he shot up two inches. All over the field are pairs of green pants, one size up. ♦
